The silence of the community, Art vs Consumerism
Nazi punks fuck off, overproduced by Martin Hannett, Take four
Welcome from inside the Lekondo fitting room. A weekly dispatch from between the mirror and the door: each issue explores a theme, highlights some standouts, and introduces what’s new — in the app, on the streets, or inside your wardrobe’s collective unconscious.
This issue comes from @notacriminal. You can find him in Komune most Fridays.
P.S. Starting this week, I’m launching a Substack where I’ll be sharing Lekondo BTS and my ongoing journey to curate an ontology for aesthetics. If you want to follow along, you can subscribe here:
I’ve been going insane inside these four walls. I haven’t been buying or been on social media, or been outside. I’ve been looking at my own clothes, falling in love with many of them again. And, while I will forever be entangled with fashion, I now realize that my relationship with fashion up to a certain point had been frivolous. The constant noise had been pushing me to buy and engage; it creates a constant sense of FOMO that you might miss out on the next drop. And i can’t lie, the dopamine from buying something new is amazing. Stepping away I missed something about it, and it took some thinking to realize what it was.
I didn’t miss fashion, I missed the community around it (my heart goes out to the Komune team).
Instead of fashion, I’ve been engaging with a lot more music; in fact, I’ve reconnected with my past audiophile hobby, and I’m planning to get a new setup for Christmas (feel free to dm me about that). The genres of music I’ve been engaging with have been mainly punk rock, metal, and rap, and it got me thinking. For a while, I’ve felt an uneasy silence pertaining to the fashion community, and I couldn’t put it into words until I separated myself from it. A majority of “fashion”, the outfits, the community, and the discourse around it have lost the intention and meaning behind it. Fashion has lost the music that made it.
The silencing of fashion
Punk, Rap, and the LGBTQ community (Not as a genre obviously, but the artists and community within), examples of cultures that have been inseparably embedded within fashion, all of these cultures are or were loud, anti-establishment movements that made a statement and solidified themselves in the minds of the people, both alive to see them and those who see the effects years after. The effects of these cultures on so many aspects of our lives, especially fashion, are undeniable. So why is it that while the people who these genres represent, who make the music, and who the music is for, are being attacked, those who dare to appropriate the styles of their culture are silent, maybe implying support at best, and outwardly compliant at best, with the scale bending towards compliance?
Fast-fashion, trend-chasing, algorithms, a healthy mix of all of them. The once alive and impactful music that influenced many and created the cultures around the clothes we wear, has been replaced with mall ambience. It is impossible to make out any sense of general cohesion within the noise that makes up what is considered to be the fashion community. Everything is “safe,” no real risk is taken anymore, and no development has really been seen. Men in skirts and nail polish were once a shocking revolutionary development, a jump in breaking down gender norms, and while there are still people who hate it, and places in the country where you can get killed for doing that, there has been no real push to develop more impactful statements through fashion. Trends have become more sterile than ever: old money, cottagecore, vintage, all things that are safe, inoffensive, derivative. And with this tone down in style, the discourse has gone with it.
The existence of fast fashion has created a one-sided and derivative discourse that limits the community as a whole. The discourse around fashion is so manufactured and dull, it’s like a caricature of a superficial stereotype. The same takes and counter-takes are spat out over and over by people who become indistinguishable from each other amidst the constant scroll slop. There are many videos highlighting how our clothes are worse now, but few are willing to look beyond the surface-level criticism of “fast fashion bad” (it is). The designers that we idolize didn’t make clothes for the sake of outfits; they did it because they had a message.
Fashion, at least good fashion, does not exist in a vacuum. The fashion industry is attempting to become self contained. To create clothes without context, art with no message, aesthetics without subculture. And as so often with these situations, the people follow the corporatations. Consuming without intention, wearing without meaning, going though trends at a mind boggling speed. Both trends and people are in an eternal search for an authenticity that cannot be manufactured. They are attempting to steal all the marketable aspects of these communities and strip the message behind them. The original voices of fashion have been washed away by the apathetic corporate scream to consume.
Consumers Vs Artists
If fashion is art, as fashion enthusiasts like to claim, then it cannot be separated from the time in which it is happening, and by extension, it cannot be separated from the era in which it is being observed. This era of fashion will pass by with a dying groan, as the only real identity or influence is the constant onslaught of micro trends that define the pinnacle of slop that defines our lives. “Fashion” has become so derivative and self-indulgent that the community at large manages to say nothing when there is everything to be said.
Every artist is a consumer, and every consumer wants to be an artist. In the age where the powers that be are trying to replace real art with AI slop, it’s more important than ever to slow down and identify and engage with real art. We’re in a situation where anything with real meaning has to be condensed into a minute-long format to be swiped past and forgotten about the next moment. The bar for what is art has been lowered to an all-time low. Arbitrary metrics of acceptance define the worth of creativity. No bigger trend depicts this more than the push for “curation”. No longer do you have to create something of worth and meaning to be validated; all you have to do is get expensive, nice-looking things and call it “curation.”
Of course, curation is a real thing to an extent, museum director is a real job. However, the sudden push for people to be “curators” to curate their space, and closets, and life, not everyone is actually putting enough thought into what they are doing to actually be “curating”. I’ve typed the word so many types it’s losing meaning, the same way it loses meaning when everyone is “curating” for the sake of “curating”. There is no engagement, there is a surface-level intention, and there is no artistry, it’s becoming shorthand for consumption with branding.
Consumption isn’t creating. Buying is not engaging.
Good art cannot be created for the sake of making art. Even the paintings of the Renaissance made for the churches and the wealthy had meaning, storytelling, and references. It has the context of history, and every time it’s talked about, it’s brought into the context of an increasingly advanced world. We do not have that history. We may never have that history. The smaller moments of creation and artistry are washed away by the flood of consumerism that defines the modern era.
Fashion as an art form is not dead. Art cannot die. There are just more consumers than ever, and those consumers consume diluted art made by other consumers, cheap imitations of art with meaning, and then begin to dilute the pool even more. Fast fashion brands are now so far on top of the food chain that they can create and control the trend cycle artificially; in fact, fast fashion is the only type of fashion that can keep up with the constant rush of new trends. The way to fight against this is simple. Buy with intention, and dress with a message.
The new age hypebeast
The infallibility that high fashion consumers feel by separating themselves from the average chud who buys fast fashion means nothing when you take into account that they are mindlessly consuming at the same level as the people they criticize. The word “quality” becomes a meaningless buzzword to validate another empty purchase. There is no engaging with the item, there is no innovation, there is no creation. Just another buyer at a different store. The Idea of “Luxury” and “Quality” has created a new sort of hypebeast. The original hypebeast had such a powerful impact when they were around because of the level of absurdity behind their consumerism. Now, within just a few short years, rampant consumerism is so common that every archetype within fashion mainstream culture fills your head with the idea that you need to buy more to look like this.
The “Quality” hype beast will buy anything because it seemingly is made with care. For many of these people, they take the brand name alone as a signal of this “quality”. And while many of the names have earned their right to be associated with quality, the issue arises when they will not be able to appreciate that well-crafted item because they have no intention and are not mindful of what they’re buying. The other day, I saw the iPhone pocket by the Issey Miyake label. When I first saw it, I thought it was absurd, but when I heard that it was from the designer label, I paused and started validating the $230 sock. Before I realized that it was the stupidest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen, and any self-respecting person would go and buy a regular bag with that money.
There is a lack of meaning behind it. The people who defend it refer to other chronically online and meaningless labels of consumerism as if that validates the item, instead of revealing a devastating picture of hopelessness and a collective scream for help. Things are no longer made by real people. Issey Miyake did not design the sock. When the clothes themselves are not made with an intention beyond the profit margin, and even the shoppers with the most developed sense of style aren’t shopping with an intention beyond getting a fit off, that leaves us in a very particular era of meaningless slop.
Politics and Fashion
From the spiky hair of punks to the uniforms of fascism, fashion has been an integral part of history since Eve bit the apple and realized she was naked. And politics is what white is to the rice that is history. I touched on this a little bit in my last article, but you are your style. Whatever you wear right now is your personal style, and it is always developing. I’ve talked to a lot of people in person and online within the fashion community, and as a whole, these are young, educated, socially aware people, aka woke liberal bastards. With young, socially aware people making up the majority of the fashion community, how is it that the fashion space seems so silent on all political matters? As all of History will tell you, fear lends itself well to compliance. The majority of the fashion community has built itself in a way where their public image is their job, or at least an important part of what they do. Fashion microcelebrities word things like politicians and corporations, trying to avoid actually addressing the issue. A culture with so much influence is suddenly becoming more conservative and traditional as prejudice becomes more normalized within our world. The same community built by queer, Black, brown, immigrant, anti-establishment subcultures is now drifting toward conservatism because silence allows it.
The discourse so prevalent within the fashion community is already so deeply embedded within political concepts. The “fast fashion bad” and “Clothes are worse now” all come from the same discussion of the dangers of capitalism and corporations within our world, and the increasing dissatisfaction the new generation feels with the broken promise of a good life if you work hard, and with the abuses of power that define the way we live. Not shopping at certain brands, avoiding fast fashion, fixing clothes and reducing waste, is an amazing start, but it doesn’t get to the core of the issue. Unfortunately, the fashion community will, most likely, not have a massive movement all backed by one idea. Everything is a “trend” or reduced to a “-core” and thrown into the pit of the millions of subcultures left to rot. We can no longer actively engage with the interesting and challenging ideas we are presented with. Due to both learned apathy from the scroll, and the constant amount of work we have to do to keep up in the world. If we’re all drowning, how can any of us help each other swim? A good first step is to work towards becoming an artist.
Art is inherently anti-power; it’s inherently pro-human. When people struggle, they create the most beautiful works of art; when fascism thrives, the first thing they do is suppress the artists who speak the truth. The entire generative AI push is to discount real artists and get people hooked on slop so they stop thinking critically. Engage with your art, understand the nuance. And if you believe Fashion to be an art form, then treat it as such and give your art a proper message.
No single person can change the overall culture. And none of the overbearing corporations that make their influence unbearably apparent within our daily lives will ever willingly be better. But it starts with solidarity, letting each other know that they are sane and that it is okay to speak their minds. And most importantly never let fascists feel comfortable within our safe spaces. Never be afraid to tell a nazi punk to fuck off.